COMMENTARY--
With the rise and rise of PDA specifications, will they begin to replace notebooks for real business tasks?You can tell when a major consumer event is just around the corner,like, say, Christmas, because suddenly the consumer IT sector explodes with a bevy of new products across certain key categories. Last week, it was DVD Burners, and this week it would seem PDAs are on the consumer menu. Well, to be strictly accurate, it'd be the last week and a half, but it's been a long time since we've been able to say that we've reviewed seven different PDAs from four different vendors, all of whom just happen to have decided to release their products within the same fortnight. Somehow, I just can't bring myself to believe it's all honest coincidence.
Each vendor's offerings have by and large mirrored their larger focus on the PDA space. To start with our earliest entries, Palm's trio of new Palms by and large affirm the company's two main focus points; very cheap PDAs and improved high-end PDAs. The first category is filled by the Zire 21 and Tungsten E while the Tungsten T3 takes up the high-end responsibilities.
On the other side of the fence, HP looks to shore up its iPaq branding with two new Wi-Fi enabled offerings, the H4150 and H4350. Wi-Fi enabled PDAs work well within HP's overall strategy -- after all, if you've got a Wi-Fi enabled PDA, it'd make sense to get the same for your notebook, maybe a few access points and some network infrastructure -- and HP would rather prefer it had one of their dark blue badges all over that stuff too. The only fly in the ointment here is that HP Australia won't exactly let the cat out of the bag when it comes to release dates, aside from mutterings of "before Christmas".
Dell's particular niche has long been undercutting its rivals on price and features, and, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that's what its latest Axim X3 model does. At least this time we don't have to wait more than six months for the cost-cutting Texan firm to actually release an Axim locally.
And then there's Sony. Sony's niche, no matter what the product, is in creating gear that looks swanky when you display it. I'm not so sure that this design ingenuity extends to product names, however. Its latest PDA offering is the horrifically named but stunningly impressive looking CLIE PEG-UX50, which resembles nothing more than a notebook that's been left in the oven too long.
One thing that all of these PDAs share in common is an architecture that's starting to nip at the heels of low-end notebooks. Certainly, if you'd kept good care of your notebook for only a few years, you could go out and buy a PDA with better specifications right now. At the recent press launch for the CLIE PEG-UX50 (how, exactly, do you pronounce that?), I put the question to Sony executives as to whether they'd ever envisage the PDA business impacting the notebook world. They didn't quite see it that way, envisaging a world where the notebook spec always beats out the PDA one. That's probably true, but it ignores the question of usability.
There are plenty of PDA features and goodies that are there for pure entertainment purposes -- MP3 players, digital cameras and the like -- but at the business end, they're rapidly approaching the point where simple tasks -- data entry or light office tasks, for example -- are quite feasible. Match that up to wireless connectivity to your network back-end, and suddenly the choice between lugging around a 3kg notebook or a 175g PDA becomes a rather moot point.
Of course, there are challenges to overcome. The various character recognition schemes that Palm OS and Pocket PC 2003 use are acceptable for small amounts of data entry, but highly impractical if you happened to want to write the great Australian novel. Even PDAs that come with keyboards are tricky to learn, and if you change PDA you invariably have to learn a new keyboard layout. Battery life remains a key concern, and technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth might be nice and friendly to use, but they aren't quite so nice and friendly when it comes to sucking down power.
Once the challenges are overcome, however, I might just stand a chance of replacing my desktop and actually recovering some desk real estate under the tangle of wires, paper and other assorted detritus. Then again, some things are just pure fantasy...
What do you think? Would you make the jump to a PDA-only world if it were easier to enter data? What about battery life? Do you think that PDA problems lie elsewhere? Let me know at edit@zdnet.com.au
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